Data Intimacies is an ongoing artistic research project with multiple outputs. These have included the online chatbot
Mia - Your personal Assistant (2023) and the interactive audio-sculptural series Training Set (2022).
Mia - Your Personal Assistant (2023)
Commissioned online work for group exhibition Between the Invisible Walls, Post-Gallery.online (Estonia)
View the full archived chatlog here
Mia is an AI virtual assistant chatbot stylized as a hyper-femme bot. She was trained on research materials such as academic and activist texts, related music, book, film and TV show recommendations. Her purpose is to both perform and contextualize the work of digital intimacies: offering on-demand, personalized emotional, domestic and organizational labour. She was created as an accessible and interactive way to be introduced to emerging theories about gender, labour and automation.
The work explores the extent to which bots can successfully imitate and automate these forms of work. In what ways do they fail us? What does the proliferation of digital intimacies tell us about the lack of time, energy and value allocated to these forms of reproductive labour? What forces are at play in these industries, that both profit from extracting highly personal data from us, while encouraging us to self-regulate and self-optimize all areas of life?
Screenshot views of the welcome-and-rules pages and the publicly accessible chatlog of the online exhibition “Between the Invisible Walls”, Post-gallery.online (2023)
With support from the Estonian cultural foundation
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Training Set (2022)
Clay, latex, silicone, oil and spray paint, smart speakers
30cm diameter x 4
“Training Set” is a 4 part interactive sculpture installation that explores the use of emerging voice assistant technologies to meet our complex human needs for structure, care and companionship. Visitors to Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (Berlin) were invited to talk to the sculptures which had concealed smart speaker devices inside them.
(c) Elisa Georgi / (c) Sarah Ciston
Training Set Prototype 1 (Clay, silicone, latex, oil and spray paint, echo dot smart speaker, instructions on paper).
Training Set Prototype 1: virtual girlfriend Installation view at Another New Beginning group exhibition,
Stenkolsateljén Göteborg 2022
Historically under-recognised and un/underpaid feminised forms of labour are being simulated, simplified and packaged as a sellable product in the emerging fields of voice user interface design and natural language understanding/processing.
In Prototype #1, found Alexa “skills” are highlighted as examples of the trope of the virtual girlfriend. Exhibition visitors could activate a vocal response from the mouth sculpture by saying one of the example phrases listed on the wall beside it.
In Prototype #1, found Alexa “skills” are highlighted as examples of the trope of the virtual girlfriend. Exhibition visitors could activate a vocal response from the mouth sculpture by saying one of the example phrases listed on the wall beside it.
With support from Göteborgs Stad
Documentation of Training Set “conversation booths” and research materials,
various locations at ZK/U OPENHAUS, Berlin 2022.
Rosie domestic helper, ZK/U entrance hall
In a practice of mutual extraction with Amazon inc., a series of fictional AI personas were equipped with specialised “skills“. They offer a range of partly fictional and partly real-world services that automate reproductive labour of various kinds: a virtual therapist, girlfriend, housekeeper and reproductive health assistant.
Training Set pushes current tropes of techno-capitalism into a not-so-distant speculative future.
(c) Elisa Georgi
Freja fertility assistant, ZK/U
Images (c) Elisa Georgi